Transistors are widely used in integrated circuits. However, transistors only have a limited range of operating conditions. High or low temperatures or ionising radiation can all change the way their constituent semiconductor materials will behave and seriously affect device operation. For example, a commercially available field programmable gate array (FPGA) designed for extreme environments can generally withstand up to 125° C. and 300 krad absorbed dose of radiation.
It is desirable, in some industries, to move electronic sensors closer to high temperature environments, for example to improve control system reaction time and reduce weight of cabling.
Nanoelectromechanical relays are electrically actuated mechanical switches in which a cantilevered or doubly-clamped beam attached to a source electrode is deflected towards a drain electrode using an electric field created from the application of a voltage difference between a gate electrode and the beam. A nanoelectromechanical device can withstand greater than 100 Mrad of radiation dose without additional radiation-hardened packaging and can operate at over 200° C. However, known nanoelectromechanical relay devices are not practical for use in most applications as they can only undergo a very limited number of switching cycles before failure.